about christopher long

Dear reader,

Thank you for expressing an interest in the history of author Christopher Long. I am sure that he is flattered by your enquiries and feels that he should be honest with you. After all, honesty is the strongest foundation to any growing relationship. Which is why I'm certain that he'd love to give you the proper biography you requested himself. Unfortunately, Mr Long is currently unable to attend to this task as he is suffering with an ongoing case of what we are choosing to call Writer's Mope.

You see, the last few years have flown by for him in a murky blur and he's only just realised that he's two years older than he thought he was and he has a novel to write. The sudden reverie has driven him into his work room and now no one can get him to answer the door. We just hope he’s working in there.

His writing career began in 2013. That was the year a work colleague sealed Mr Long's fate forever by telling him that you could put your own stories on the Kindle all by yourself. No agent, no publisher, no problem. You could just write something and publish it. Even though it seemed far too good to be true, that's exactly what he did. He wrote a short ghost story set on a midnight motorway drive and put it out for his birthday that April. When that was done, he knew there was only one way to proceed. He wrote more stories and released them all. There were stories about locked boxes found buried under people's homes, terrible family secrets that could take a person over and a man who kept himself alive by feeding on the stories he saw in other people’s souls, to name but a few. After Mr. Long had put these stories out, he sat back and waited for the literary world to come knocking at his door. Sadly, that didn't happen.

Then, in 2014, things took an unexpected turn for the brilliant when Kensington Gore Publishing offered to release his stories for him. They would properly publish the ones he’d already written, along with some additional tales he could put with them. Not only that, but they also said they’d help him bring out a novel or two.

It has been an intense and relentless creative relationship, but well worth the work. Now he's got six novellas released with them, alongside three collections and a story in a Halloween themed compilation. He also published his first novel with them, Something Needs Bleeding. It’s a rather clever little meditation on where ideas come from and how personal horror can affect a horror writer’s stories, all told through five seemingly unrelated short stories written by the recently diseased writer Thomas Singer. An old friend (and fictional character) of Mr Long’s. He’s currently working on his second novel for Kensington Gore as I write this, when he’s able to face the blank page.

Mr Long has also been incredibly fortunate to work with Shadows at the Door as well. For the past three years, he’s been luckily enough to write their ghost story for Christmas and he also has a short story in their first anthology, which was released in 2016.

I am certain Mr Long would love to tell you all this himself, along with how he first got into writing as a boy and who his favourite authors are, but he’s still not coming out of his room. I can tell that his room is located in Rugby, in a house where he lives with his very understanding wife, and that he clearly needs to get to work on that second novel of his. Much like the first, it has made it abundantly clear that is not going to write itself.